I have been asked how this resolution of the tale would affect life as we know it. My sad answer is that the new normal would be beyond horrific. Think about it.
Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. A former resident of Chicago, they are a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and the University of Kansas’s MFA program. Nino’s fiction and essays have been published in dozens of different venues. Their short story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, and their novella Finna—about queer heartbreak, working retail, and wormholes—will be published in 2020. Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. One time an angry person on the Internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty funny.
▪ My mom moved to an old farmhouse a couple years ago. To get there, you have to drive down a long, creepy dirt road, past an old graveyard, decrepit barns, and some sheep that are definitely up to no good. So this story started from a particular scene on that dirt road: two characters in a car, and one of them unintentionally starting to drive dangerously fast. Why? What was happening in that car? What were they talking about? The story spun out from what turned out to be a climactic scene. The beginning came easily, but the middle was a muddle. Maddie and Nita’s many conversations sat in a notebook for a couple years until I left Chicago for grad school in Kansas. The feelings of being simultaneously homesick for a place and estranged from it leaked into the story—with some added monsters and creepiness, just to keep things fun. I originally planned to write “Dead Air” as an audio drama, but realized that formatting it as a transcription would create a fourth wall for some extra horror to break through. Not that it was easy. It took multiple drafts before I could strike the right balance between giving readers enough information to understand the story and keeping the found footage aesthetic and structure.
Phenderson Djèlí Clark is the author of the novellas The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His short stories of speculative fiction have appeared in various online and print venues. He presently resides with his wife, infant daughters, and pet dragon in an Edwardian castle in New England, where he is also a historian of slavery and emancipation.
▪ In a Mount Vernon ledger book, nestled between payment for window repairs at George Washington’s Alexandria home and compensation to a ship captain for imported Nankeen cloth, is a curious notation: “By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire.” Washington’s dental problems are part of popular Americana. They weren’t actually wooden (as folklore suggests) but instead made from numerous materials. And perhaps, based on this notation, the teeth of slaves. I wanted to write a story about those mysterious teeth and the lives of the enslaved who parted with them. When it comes to the voices of the marginalized, the historical record at times throws up vexing silences. This case was no exception. Who the enslaved were and their motives remain lost to us. But even if we can’t know, we can still imagine. As the early African American writer Pauline Hopkins maintained, fiction can be utilized to illuminate the larger truths of our fractured past. So in this story I turned to the speculative: mixing bits of history with elements of the fantastic to try to root out those larger truths.
Hugo Award–winner Sarah Gailey is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and they are a regular contributor to Tor.com and B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog. Their short fiction credits include Fireside Fiction, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their debut novella, River of Teeth, was published in 2017 and was a 2018 Hugo and Nebula Award finalist. Their adult novel debut, Magic for Liars, was published in 2019. You can find links to their work at www.sarahgailey.com; find them on social media @gaileyfrey.
▪ “STET” was a labor of spite. I wrote this story after a conversation in which someone professed skepticism at the ability of a writer of genre fiction to read literary fiction and explore form in a similar fashion to a “literary” writer. At the time I tried to engage them about the false distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction, but when I got home, I was still angry. I decided to write a piece that in form referenced some of my favorite literary fiction, told in footnotes that inject emotion into an otherwise dry piece. My partnership with Fireside Fiction in publishing this was what brought it to the level it is now, both in content and in form.
Daryl Gregory’s most recent novel, Spoonbenders, was a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist for 2018. His next novel will be coming out in 2020. Other recent works are the young adult novel Harrison Squared and the novella We Are All Completely Fine, which won the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards. The SF novel Afterparty was an NPR and Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His other novels are the Crawford Award–winning Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, and Raising Stony Mayhall. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories (a Publishers Weekly top five sci-fi/fantasy book of the year). His comics work includes Legenderry: Green Hornet and the Planet of the Apes and Dracula: Company of Monsters series (the latter cowritten with Kurt Busiek).
▪ Here’s the metaphor I’m going with: stories are rivers fed by many streams. “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” came from many different ideas flowing through my head over the years, and it’s impossible to say which came first, or which gave rise to the others. It’s the mixing that makes the story. Here’s a short and incomplete list of influences—ready? Our civilization’s failure to deal with global warming because we can’t think in global timescales, or even generational ones. My grandmother’s house in Tennessee. The unlikely tidiness of science fiction stories in which huge problems are identified and solved in the space of weeks or months. Love. My trip to Colombia. My best friend in high school, who risked coming out to me. Richard O. Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty, which introduced me to bowerbirds and the arbitrariness of aesthetic choices. Inflatable car-lot air dancers. Love. The video game my son created in high school which featured Fibonacci sequences. A time-lapse video of a bean sprout reaching for a ladder. The wacky 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, and Alanna Collen’s considerably less wacky but more eye-opening book, 10% Human. Andy Duncan’s meteoric mnemonic. My aging parents. My divorce. My aging body. My children. Love.
Ada Hoffmann’s debut novel, The Outside, was released in June 2019. She is also the author of the collection Monsters in My Mind and of dozens of speculative short stories and poems as well as the Autistic Book Party #ownvoices review series. Her work has been longlisted for the BSFA Award for shorter fiction, the Rhysling Award, and the D Franklin Defying Doomsday Award. Ada is a computer scientist at a university in eastern Ontario, Canada, where she teaches computers to be creative and undergraduates to think computationally about the human mind. She has also worked professionally as a church soprano, free food distributor, and token autistic person. Ada is bisexual, genderfluid, polyamorous, and mentally ill. She lives with her primary partner, Dave, her black cat, Ninja, and various other animals and people. You can find Ada online at ada-hoffmann.com, on Twitter at @xasymptote, or support her work on Patreon at patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.